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Even though passwords are targeted for elimination by new-gen security companies, there are still plenty of them in use out there, and they have to be managed.
Upstart identity access management provider OneLogin, a relatively unknown, enterprise-level cloud-service provider with more than 1,400 customers, on June 15 announced the acquisition of Santa Clara, Calif.-based Portadi, a 2-year-old cloud-based password-management tool vendor.
The acquisition will enable OneLogin customers to improve their employee productivity by automatically populating their OneLogin portal with apps as they manually sign into them.
Terms of the transaction were not released.
The Idea Is to Remove Friction
“A requirement for driving security to new levels is removing any friction in the user experience,” OneLogin CEO and co-founder Thomas Pedersen said. “Portadi’s technology accomplishes this beautifully and will on-board the long tail of apps in an organization 10 times faster than before.”
San Francisco-based OneLogin has been a major proponent of the Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) single sign-on (SSO) standard, supporting more than 1,000 SAML apps out of a catalog of 5,000. While SAML is ideal because it eliminates passwords, the majority of apps into which employees sign do not support SAML, and many never will.
Portadi’s machine-learning IP will automate on-board credentialing for all of the apps used in the organization, without any manual steps involved. This can be a major time saver for both employees and IT personnel.
“With the increasing number of security breaches, it’s critical for enterprises to secure all applications used by their organizations and not just the low-hanging fruit of popular SaaS applications, but also the long tail of all apps used by enterprises,” said 451 Group Senior Analyst Garrett Bekker. “Providing single sign-on access to applications that don’t support standards like SAML has been a challenge for many IDaaS vendors.
Firms Struggling With the Proliferation of Applications
“Providing customers with the ability to instantly and securely use new applications, even those that don’t support SAML, should be welcome by firms of all sizes that are struggling with the proliferation of applications. Employees can realize immediate productivity gains while IT has confidence that their app portfolios are secure.”
OneLogin’s acquisition is the latest in a series of major business moves in the identity and access management (IAM) sector. Last week, Vista Equity Partners announced that it is acquiring Ping Identity for $600 million, a move CEO Andre Durand said will set the stage for big investments in the company’s platform and partners.
OneLogin currently serves 1,400-plus companies in 44 countries. For more information, go here.